Army Sergeant: “I love it when I hear, ‘Oh there weren’t any chemical weapons in Iraq. There were plenty.’"

Five thousand munitions containing
nerve and blister agent were uncovered between 2004 and 2011. The
revelation made headlines for a day or two before vanishing again.

As it turns out, the Bush administration knew about these weapons
and, counter-intuitively, chose to keep them secret. Conjecture abounds
as to why Team Bush would choose to withhold vindicating evidence. Some
have suggested that no one wanted to look backwards at yesterday’s
controversy.

… “The discoveries of these chemical weapons did not support the
government’s invasion rationale,” write Pulitzer Prize winner CJ
Chivers.

I can’t decide whether Chivers is deceitful or just another lazy journalist. Actually, those were exactly the weapons we were looking for. In November of 2002, President
Bush asked the UN for, and received, Resolution 1441, which found Iraq
in material breach of Resolution 667, the 1991 ceasefire agreement that
ended the Gulf War. Resolution 667 demanded that Saddam destroy all of
his chemical weapons and document the process to the satisfaction of UN
weapons inspectors. He failed to do this.

… The diplomatic push of 2002 was the
world’s final warning to the dictator that he had to forfeit those
weapons known to be in his possession in 1991. The resolution is crystal
clear. Over and over again it refers to Saddam’s failure to discard his
pre-Gulf War weaponry. CJ Chivers is not just moving the goalposts,
he’s rewriting history.

The idea that Saddam didn’t have any WMD was a little wacky, and yet
it was those of us who insisted that he did who were portrayed as
conspiracy theorists grasping at straws. He used those weapons against
Iranians and Kurds. We know that they existed in 1991. Did they simple
evaporate?

We now know that they did not. Quoted in Chivers’s story was Jarod
Taylor, a former Army sergeant who handled some of the weapons. He
remarked, “I love it when I hear, ‘Oh there weren’t any chemical weapons
in Iraq. There were plenty.’”

… when the Times revealed that
Saddam’s WMD were in fact not phantasmal, as we had been led to believe,
I wondered if it was worth dredging up an old debate.

Yes, I decided. Because the truth matters.

The public deserves to know what really
happened though it may never hear it because the Iraq War narrative is
now so thoroughly rehearsed that it actively resists change. Tomorrow’s
history books will probably tell an oversimplified and basically
inaccurate story about an evil Texas oil man who sent his troops on a
fool’s errand. That’s not the case and it’s important that the lie
doesn’t become the “truth” because of constant repetition.

… The leadup to the Iraq invasion may seem
like ancient history now. Heck, most kids in high school today can’t
even remember it. It’s not too late however, to insist upon the truth
because truth has a value of its own.